The Candice Malcolm Show - September 30, 2021


The PPC are not to blame for O’Toole’s failure

Topics
Chinese Canadian population Chinese government interference in Canadian election
Hosted by
Candice Malcolm
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Erin O'Toole Aurora Oak Ridge Peter Burrow-Kortha Markham Unionville Mariam Monsef Jody Wilson-Raybould Hamish Marshall Calgary Skyview Edmonton Centre Maxime Bernier Richmond Hill Malcolm Show Jenica Atwin Mike Harris Doug Ford Bonavista-Burin Bonavista Harper
O’Toole’s Bait and Switch Trudeau goes to the beach on Truth and Reconciliation Day

Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

182.29

Word count

3,296

Sentence count

190

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Candice Malan and Hamish Marshall discuss the results of the 2019 election and look ahead to the next election, which will be held on Oct. 19, 2021. They also look at the final election results and debate the final outcome of the campaign.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.080 Even if you combined the PPC and the Conservative vote in the 2021 election,
00:00:04.720 Erin O'Toole still would not become Prime Minister.
00:00:06.980 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:13.720 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:00:15.820 And before we get to the meat of the program,
00:00:17.800 I just want to acknowledge that today is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
00:00:22.140 for Canada's First Nations people.
00:00:24.500 This is the first year that we are doing this.
00:00:26.460 The day is to honour the children who were lost and who perished at residential schools
00:00:31.760 in Canada, as well as their families and communities.
00:00:34.740 I think this is a really important day.
00:00:36.220 I know this issue gets really politicised,
00:00:38.300 and I know the issue with the supposed unmarked graves that were recently discovered
00:00:42.660 at First Nations communities and near residential schools.
00:00:46.380 That story was really torqued, and I was very critical of it.
00:00:48.960 But that said, I still think that this kind of a day to understand our history,
00:00:53.580 to understand the serious flaws of a program like the residential school program,
00:00:58.880 the whole idea that a big, centralised government should step in,
00:01:03.180 take kids out of their families, out of their homes, out of their communities, 1.00
00:01:06.520 to try to sort of socially engineer them into some outcome,
00:01:10.180 was a totally flawed program.
00:01:12.220 And we should learn more about that.
00:01:13.740 We should acknowledge it.
00:01:14.640 So I just want to acknowledge this day,
00:01:16.500 say that I think it's a good step forward,
00:01:18.180 and I hope that we can continue as a country to work towards raising the quality of life
00:01:24.180 for people who live in First Nations reserves,
00:01:26.960 people who have had a totally different and unfair opportunities in this country.
00:01:32.520 So I want to acknowledge, I know you're supposed to wear orange.
00:01:34.540 I didn't know that.
00:01:35.780 I don't have much orange in my outfit.
00:01:37.520 So maybe next year I'll try to wear orange for that reason.
00:01:41.440 Moving on, here on the Candace Malcolm Show,
00:01:43.520 we have been doing a series of postmortems on the election,
00:01:47.400 doing deep dives into the very flawed approach of Aaron O'Toole and the Conservatives
00:01:52.000 to sort of tact left in the last election, run as centrists, run as moderates.
00:01:56.540 We've been quite critical of that and looking at the many reasons why that failed
00:02:00.800 and why the Conservatives lost to Justin Trudeau.
00:02:04.220 Now, this series wouldn't be complete
00:02:05.940 if it weren't for a better understanding of the numbers,
00:02:08.740 looking at the final outcome of the campaign.
00:02:11.140 And to do that, we're joined by Hamish Marshall.
00:02:13.820 Hamish, as you know, was our in-house pollster during the election.
00:02:18.340 Hamish, welcome back to the show.
00:02:19.600 Good to see you again.
00:02:20.820 Great to be here.
00:02:21.860 So let's talk about the final outcome.
00:02:24.980 Let's talk about the difference, first of all.
00:02:27.060 What was the outcome?
00:02:28.380 Because we had you on election night,
00:02:29.440 but there were still some outstanding votes that hadn't been counted.
00:02:32.700 So what were the final numbers?
00:02:34.220 What was the difference between the 2019 map and the 2021 map?
00:02:38.040 Well, very little.
00:02:38.840 I mean, I'd have to go back and check,
00:02:40.740 but I believe this is the Canadian election
00:02:42.960 with the smallest amount of changes from the previous campaign.
00:02:47.400 So the Liberals picked up two seats over 2019,
00:02:52.400 getting up 159.
00:02:54.480 The Conservatives lost two seats.
00:02:57.800 The Greens lost a seat.
00:03:00.680 And an independent, obviously, Jody Wilson-Ribault didn't run again. 0.96
00:03:04.640 So independents went down one.
00:03:06.340 And both the Block and the NDP went up one seat.
00:03:09.860 I think you could say it's fairly, you know,
00:03:13.080 there's been a lot of coverage of how it's been disappointing for everybody.
00:03:15.280 And I think that's accurate.
00:03:16.340 Everybody came out of this election expecting to have done significantly better.
00:03:20.560 No one overperformed, with the possible exception of the PPC.
00:03:25.780 But they didn't win any seats either.
00:03:28.280 So they've got lots to be disappointed about as well. 0.51
00:03:31.020 Yeah, it did feel like everyone was a loser.
00:03:33.460 I know that the Liberals technically won the election and they walked away.
00:03:36.300 But obviously, Justin Trudeau planned and devised this whole campaign
00:03:40.000 so that he would get a majority government.
00:03:42.200 And he didn't get that.
00:03:43.140 So just by virtue of him not getting a majority, it was like he lost.
00:03:48.180 Well, Hamish, you came up with a really nifty guide for us during the election,
00:03:53.300 the 45 ridings to watch.
00:03:55.280 And you sort of broke them down by the key seats that the Liberals had to win,
00:03:58.640 the key seats that the Conservatives would have to win,
00:04:00.840 and the ones that the NDP would have to win in order to make the inroads that they needed.
00:04:06.500 So maybe that would be a good place to start to determine who picked up what they needed to win.
00:04:12.220 Well, as I said, nobody made a big breakthrough.
00:04:14.740 So if we look at the list of, you know, we had 20 ridings the Liberals need to win.
00:04:20.080 They won Vancouver-Ranville.
00:04:22.040 Jody Wilson-Raybould wasn't running again.
00:04:24.080 They didn't pick up any of the seats they had targeted in Quebec.
00:04:27.020 They won St. John's East off the NDP in Newfoundland and Labrador, as predicted.
00:04:31.200 Although that was actually closer than expected.
00:04:34.840 You know, the NDP had lost a long time, a popular local MP,
00:04:38.540 and they wasn't sure that his popularity would transfer their new candidate.
00:04:43.160 They actually did pretty well there.
00:04:45.480 The Liberals successfully picked up Fredericton.
00:04:48.460 That was the seat the Greens had won last time.
00:04:50.560 The Green MP, Jenica Atwin, had crossed to the Liberals.
00:04:54.160 It ended up being a very, very closer race.
00:04:56.740 The Greens were far, far behind, and the Conservatives actually did quite well.
00:05:00.220 But the Liberals still managed to hang on to it, winning there.
00:05:03.620 They didn't make the gains in the West.
00:05:07.500 They broadly expect her in British Columbia.
00:05:09.300 There was a bunch of seats in British Columbia they had targeted.
00:05:12.240 But they picked up Cloverdale, Langley City as sort of their one pickup in BC.
00:05:17.920 In Alberta, they picked up Calgary Skyview and Edmonton Centre.
00:05:28.000 And then in Ontario, they picked up Aurora, Oak Ridges, Richmond Hill, which were all on the list.
00:05:34.380 But there's a lot of other seats that they didn't win.
00:05:37.440 And, you know, a seat like Charleswood, St. James, and Sineboya, that was certainly on their list in the Winnipeg area, went down to a recount.
00:05:45.180 The Conservatives were ahead by only 24 votes before the recount.
00:05:48.480 After the recount, the Conservatives won by, I think, about 400.
00:05:52.380 So it was certainly close.
00:05:54.320 And the Liberals, you know, they picked up a few of their targets, but not very many, and left a lot of seats on the table.
00:05:59.660 And what's interesting is that in a lot of areas, the biggest change was that incumbents did better.
00:06:05.320 So if you look at the seats that the Liberals tried to pick up off the block, or even the ones that tried to pick up off the Conservatives, you know, a good example is West Nova in Nova Scotia, where the Conservatives in 2019 won by about less than 3%.
00:06:16.640 You know, the Conservatives won by a much, much larger margin this time.
00:06:20.880 We saw incumbents, the incumbents that survived, generally won with much larger margins, especially non-Liberal incumbents.
00:06:27.320 So, you know, the Liberals, they picked up a few of their seats, but they also lost some on the other side.
00:06:32.600 So they ended up in a situation where they were still plus 2.
00:06:36.520 So you had 12 Tory targets, and these were 12 Liberal-held seats that you thought that the Conservatives would have to win to make the gains.
00:06:44.720 I know that one of them in here, Peter Burrow-Kortha, the former Member of Parliament, Miriam Monsef, and the former Cabinet Minister, she lost.
00:06:53.320 Were there any other seats in this list that went to the Conservatives?
00:06:57.380 I know they didn't do very well in the 905, they wouldn't have won seats like the one in Richmond Hill or King Vaughan, but were there any other upsets?
00:07:06.820 No, the Conservatives did win King Vaughan.
00:07:08.800 Oh, they did? Okay.
00:07:09.420 Yeah. So, you know, in the 905, the Conservatives lost two seats, Markham Unionville and Aurora Oak Ridge's Richmond Hill, but they picked up the Kin Vaughan seats, so for a net of minus one.
00:07:21.340 On this list, they picked up Miramichi Grand Lake by a decent margin, but not perhaps as much as they would have liked.
00:07:28.840 They picked up Peter Burrow-Kortha, defeating Camden Minister Miriam Monsef, as you correctly pointed out.
00:07:34.560 They also won Bonavista, no, sorry, they won a different seat in rural Newfoundland.
00:07:39.900 Bonavista-Burin, Trinity was reasonably close, but they won another seat in central Newfoundland, Costa Bay's central Nautsla Dam.
00:07:50.180 So they won some seats like that, but, you know, on the whole, they're net down minus two, mainly because of losses between Alberta and B.C., the Conservatives lost seven seats.
00:08:03.400 So the seats that they did pick up in Atlantic Canada, the four seats they picked up in Atlantic Canada were not enough to overcome those losses, which is why they ended up down minus two.
00:08:20.860 So one of the interesting takeaways is how the Conservatives just didn't really make the inroads that they were looking in suburban parts of the country, so mostly the 905, as well as Vancouver.
00:08:32.140 They didn't pick up seats in Vancouver, they actually shed some.
00:08:35.420 So what happened and why did that, why did they lose those seats?
00:08:40.240 Well, I mean, look, the Conservatives lost across the 905, they lost 50,000 votes.
00:08:43.800 They didn't get the votes out that they did last time, which certainly would have helped in a bunch of those seats.
00:08:47.940 But one of the things that unites a lot of the seats that they didn't win, other ones that they lost, or the ones they'd hoped to have win didn't, is a significant Chinese population, Chinese Canadian population.
00:08:59.040 So we saw the Conservatives losing Richmond, Steveston Richmond East, Markham Unionville in Ontario, and also seats like Aurora Oak Ridge's Richmond Hill, which has a little bit of, has some Chinese Canadian population,
00:09:16.440 and Richmond Hill, which was a seat which was very close in the last election, was not as close this time.
00:09:21.960 So it was a big, big drop.
00:09:23.860 You know, the Chinese Canadian population had been, for the last decade, big supporters of the Conservative Party.
00:09:29.500 The Conservatives done very, very well with that group of Canadians.
00:09:32.620 And we saw a significant, significant drop this time, which hurt the Conservatives, both in the Lower Mainland and in the 905.
00:09:41.120 One of the stories that came out, I know that Aaron O'Toole sort of took a firm on China stance and was talking a little bit about how China deals unfairly on the world stage,
00:09:52.840 their human rights abuses, their trade abuses.
00:09:55.260 And he was sort of presenting himself as a tough on China type guy.
00:09:58.460 And Trudeau sort of twisted that and accused him of stoking anti-Chinese bigotry and hatred.
00:10:05.980 And then we saw a story about WeChat, the Chinese social networking texting app.
00:10:13.060 Basically, there was some kind, I don't know if it's verified or not, but there was some kind of a campaign run from Beijing to encourage Chinese Canadians not to vote for the Conservatives.
00:10:24.020 So can you tell us a little bit more about that? And do you think that that had an impact?
00:10:28.480 Well, there was an entirely parallel, just as campaigns have evolved on English-speaking social networks like Facebook,
00:10:36.440 there was an entirely different parallel campaign being fought strongly and viciously and with great intensity on WeChat in Chinese.
00:10:45.760 And there's a lot of accusations and it's really no holds barred politics on that app.
00:10:55.940 You know, there's been allegations that a lot of the anti-conservative messages came from, you know, accounts associated with the Chinese government.
00:11:06.920 I obviously am not an expert in these things. I don't know which accounts these things came from, but it certainly seemed that there was a coordinated and concerted attack on the Conservatives on WeChat,
00:11:18.120 which I think had a big, big impact in Chinese Canadian communities. And we saw that in the results.
00:11:23.420 It's interesting because when the Americans thought that there was Russian interference in their election in 2016, it led to like a huge, you know, overwhelming campaign movement, media campaign.
00:11:36.920 You know, it's all we heard about for years after the 2016 U.S. campaign.
00:11:42.440 Here we have another adversarial government, probably perhaps worse than the Russians. 0.99
00:11:47.200 I'm talking about the Chinese in Beijing, potentially interfering with our election, potentially, you know, really swaying these few key ridings.
00:11:57.020 And we're not hearing much about it. That's disappointing.
00:11:59.800 I want to, you know, I think that, you know, I can say from, you know, my experience in the last election that in the last election, the Canadian Security Services had set up a group to brief the parties on attempts at foreign interference to representatives of the RCMP and CSIS there.
00:12:18.340 You know, I certainly hope that the Conservative campaign is bringing these concerns to that group to see if they can get action.
00:12:26.840 And, you know, obviously it's all covered by, you know, official secrets rules and things now.
00:12:32.040 And I don't have insight on what's happened so far, but I really, really hope that someone has initiated some of those things you're talking about.
00:12:40.280 Yeah, same here. I want to move on, Hamish, and talk a little bit about the People's Party and the sort of vote splitting.
00:12:46.820 I know we talked about this throughout the campaign, that the People's Party wasn't just made up of the sort of libertarian wing of the Conservative Party who felt disillusioned and left,
00:12:56.020 that Maxime Bernier's anti-lockdown message was really resonating across the political spectrum,
00:13:01.000 especially with people who are already kind of open to voting for protest parties, people who might be more on the left.
00:13:07.200 I shared this nifty little graph on Twitter that basically, even if you were to take all of the PPC's votes, I think they got about 840,000,
00:13:17.340 if you were to take all of those, give them to Conservatives, just assume that those would have been Conservative voters.
00:13:22.620 Otherwise, if Aaron O'Toole had tried to appeal to libertarians in his campaign, even if that were the case,
00:13:28.440 the popular vote for the Conservatives would have gone up to 39%, but they would have only gotten 142 seats.
00:13:34.020 And the Liberals, the Liberals would have lost, I think, something like 16 seats.
00:13:37.660 So the difference, the Conservatives lost 23 seats roughly because of the votes that went over to the PPC.
00:13:45.080 Again, if you're assuming that they're all Conservative voters, 16 of those seats went to the Liberals.
00:13:49.820 So even if that was reversed, the Conservative vote would have gone up to 142.
00:13:53.820 The Liberal vote would have stayed at 143 of the seats once.
00:13:57.640 So it wouldn't have made the difference.
00:13:59.260 It would have been really close.
00:14:00.300 It would have been really interesting, but the PPC vote was not the determining factor in the election.
00:14:06.980 Can you offer some insight or help us understand this a little further?
00:14:11.320 Yeah, I mean, the Liberal vote has become extraordinarily efficient.
00:14:16.780 And I imagine if we looked at those results that some of the ones that the Liberals won by would have been winning by dozens or hundreds of votes.
00:14:24.920 You know, we would see the Liberals win a lot of seats by very little and Conservatives win a lot of seats by an awful lot.
00:14:32.340 And so we're in a situation where, you know, that Liberal vote has become very, very efficient, especially in Ontario.
00:14:41.440 But it speaks to a Conservative need to really break through in the 905.
00:14:47.000 We can't, you know, Conservatives can't be hoping just to add an extra percent here or percent there.
00:14:52.560 You know, if Conservatives want to win, you know, the 20-odd seats in the 905, which is what they need to do in order to win government, they should be able to, they need to be winning these seats cleanly, as Harper did in 2011, as Doug Ford did in 2018.
00:15:10.200 And as, you know, Mike Harris did historically in the late 90s.
00:15:15.300 So the Conservatives need to win these seats by a lot.
00:15:18.360 There's a lot more work to do in terms of figuring out what needs to do to get more votes out.
00:15:23.680 But they have to start from the point that the number of votes we got in the 905 in 2021 was, you know, Conservatives lost 50,000 votes.
00:15:32.820 And that's a bad, bad place to start.
00:15:35.360 Wow. Yeah, absolutely.
00:15:36.520 Especially given the strategy of the campaign there.
00:15:39.320 A lot of people are now talking, Hamish, about the need for electoral reform, just given that the popular vote is so lopsided with the seat count.
00:15:48.920 And, you know, if you look at, there's been a graph circulating on social media showing the percentage of the popular vote that the Prime Minister has gotten.
00:15:57.460 You said that the Trudeau Liberals have gotten increasingly, you know, concise in how they campaign.
00:16:03.980 But that's not necessarily good for the country, given that they're not winning the majority or even the plurality.
00:16:08.760 Of votes.
00:16:10.140 I know this is sort of not necessarily your area of expertise, but what do you think of the idea of electoral reform and proportional representation here in Canada?
00:16:18.300 Look, I think that I traditionally have not been a big fan of electoral reform, but I'm a sort of a traditionalist conservative sort of fellow.
00:16:27.260 So I don't I don't like big change.
00:16:29.560 But I think I think you could see Canada moving towards a system similar to what they have in Germany and New Zealand, a hybrid system where somewhere between a half and two thirds of the MPs are still elected in constituencies like we have right now.
00:16:42.700 And then there's a group of MPs that are elected elected from a list, which would make the overall result more proportional, maybe not strictly proportional, more proportional.
00:16:53.240 I think ending up in a system like that with something would would be I don't think that's inconceivable in Canada.
00:16:59.400 I just don't think it's in anyone's interest.
00:17:00.960 You know, the liberals aren't interested in that kind of a change.
00:17:05.920 The conservatives are doing well, would do well of it now, but never would have had a majority government.
00:17:12.760 So I don't I don't I don't I'm not holding my breath.
00:17:16.680 I don't think it would happen.
00:17:17.500 I'm not I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I could be persuaded that it is.
00:17:20.700 But I don't think it's going to happen in in a very, very, very long time in this country.
00:17:26.340 Well, especially because, I mean, Trudeau was once a proponent of it.
00:17:30.260 He once campaigned on it and promised that the 2015 election would be the last election ever determined by the first pass to post system.
00:17:36.760 But then he won a majority in that government and in that election and realized that, hey, this voting system isn't all that bad if I can win a majority.
00:17:43.920 So surprise, surprise, a politician doing something in their own self-interest.
00:17:48.000 Hamish, thank you so much for joining us and for providing insight.
00:17:51.720 Thank you for joining us throughout the election campaign.
00:17:54.240 You really helped add a lot of insight and color to the election, helping us understand what was going on out there.
00:17:59.440 We really appreciate it.
00:18:00.580 My pleasure.
00:18:01.940 All right. Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:18:03.220 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.